I've just woken up completely spaced out and I'm waiting for the coffee to kick in. I remember a few strange dreams from last night.

In one, I was somewhere that I think was a science centre. I'd become separated from my wife and son and I was doing silly things with the things in the science centre.

My wife texted asking what part of the building I was in. Then somehow she sent me CCTV footage of myself fooling around.

In the dream I panicked.

Have I been drinking in that footage?

Even though I knew I hadn't.

Then I dreamed about my recovery worker.

I could see that he was writing me a message on WhatsApp. He's never actually sent me a message on WhatsApp. I could see that he was typing one in the dream, but the message never arrived.

He was writing it, and then he never sent it.

Then there was another one.

My wife and I were heading to the cinema with two close friends. They asked me how I was doing.

I said, "I am genuinely doing great."

And then I started crying in front of them.

I'm not going to decide what any of that means.

The first one is slightly different from drinking dreams I've had before. I've previously woken anxious after dreaming that I had actually been drinking. This time, even inside the dream, I knew I hadn't been drinking. The panic was about whether the footage would somehow show that I had.

CCTV and worrying I'd been drinking when I knew I hadn't. A message from my recovery worker that never arrived. Telling friends I was genuinely doing great and then crying in front of them.

That's what I dreamed.

Now I need this coffee to work.

When my wife actually left with our son, my first reaction wasn't instant enlightenment.

There was anger in there.

How dare you go?

How dare you call me an alcoholic?

That's uncomfortable to write now because she was right.

Then my son turned and looked at me.

And said:

"Bye Daddy."

He wasn't just looking at me. He was looking into me.

That's how it felt.

I knew he knew.

I need to be careful with that sentence because he's six and I cannot know what was actually going through his head.

He may not know what it is.

But I believe he knows something is wrong with Daddy.

I said almost exactly that to my wife's friend at swimming a few days later.

And the thought that keeps coming back is:

how could i have done this to our precious little boy.

I don't have a clever ending for that.

That's just what I feel.

That might look like denial from the outside.

Maybe somebody else would hear it that way.

But it doesn't feel like denial.

I'm not saying the problem is smaller.

I'm saying I don't want the problem to become my identity.

Nobody says heroinholic.

Nobody says cocaineholic.

If somebody becomes addicted to another substance, we can say exactly that.

They became addicted to it.

So why should alcohol get to turn itself into a noun for the entire person?

I became addicted to alcohol.

That sentence makes more sense to me.

The funny thing is that I still wouldn't go back and change the message I sent my wife.

"I am an alcoholic" was what I needed that night.

It was brutal.

It was difficult to wriggle out of.

It cut through something.

Now, days later, I'm already pulling the language apart and asking questions.

That's probably very me.

I analyse everything.

I'm interested in why we use certain words, what they make us believe, what happens in the brain, why one person can stop drinking because they simply don't like what alcohol does to them while another person can know perfectly well what it's doing and still have an internal salesman working overtime.

I'm reading about it.

I've gone through alcohol books and started another.

I'm reading This Naked Mind and finding the different way it looks at beliefs around alcohol genuinely interesting.

I'm looking at AA even though I've never naturally thought of myself as an AA person.

My sister has told me to get my arse into a room with actual people who understand this, regardless of whether every part of AA fits me.

I'm looking properly at Moving On too.

I'd been treating it almost as the building where I see my recovery worker once a week, when there are groups and other support around me that I've never really used.

SMART interests me.

So does the psychology.

So does art therapy.

So does the question of why talking about all this suddenly feels so good.

I don't need to decide today what label I wear for the rest of my life.

I know the important part.

Alcohol got its claws into me.

And I don't want it there anymore.

Alcohol bad.

Don't drink alcohol.

Job done.

Apparently my brain hadn't read the memo.

Only a few days after the click I was feeling better.

I'd told people.

I'd started reading.

I'd started looking properly at the support around me rather than treating counselling as one hour a week where I could discuss alcohol and then go back to trying to sort everything myself.

I was sleeping more deeply.

I was waking during the night, but there were mornings when I noticed something completely bizarre.

I was smiling.

I was talking to people more too. Wee bits of banter in shops. Conversations with strangers. Nothing earth-shattering, but enough for me to notice because I've always thought of myself as quiet and shy.

Or I was.

I'm not even sure now.

Then the demon changed its argument.

It didn't say:

"Fuck everything. Get drunk."

That would have been easy.

Instead:

"You're doing really well."

True.

"You're clearly turning a corner."

Maybe.

"You did loads of good things yesterday and cleared your head."

Also true.

Then came the conclusion.

"Have a little bit. You've earned it."

Clever little fucker.

It had taken my progress away from alcohol and turned it into an argument for alcohol.

That fascinated me almost as much as it worried me.

I started noticing that the demon didn't really care what the evidence was. It cared about the conclusion.

Bad day?

You deserve a drink.

Good day?

You've earned a drink.

Stressed?

Have one to relax.

Feeling brilliant?

Celebrate.

Been healthy?

Reward yourself.

Been drinking too much?

Have one last drink before you stop.

Been sober?

See, you've proved you can control it.

The facts could change completely and somehow the answer remained the same.

Drink.

Even more interestingly, sometimes the demon didn't mention alcohol at all.

One of its arguments became:

"This is easier than you thought."

Followed by:

"You don't need AA."

"You don't need counselling."

"You're better than that."

That's clever too.

If it can't persuade me directly to drink, perhaps it can persuade me to remove the things that might make it harder for me to drink later.

I'm not claiming that's scientifically what is happening in my brain. I'm describing what it feels like from inside it.

And from inside it, the little bastard is adaptable.

And then it found something else to use.

The fact that I was writing all this down.

The thought was:

"would me having a drink at some point between now and end of the journey not make a great chapter"

That was genuinely the thought. Apparently G had literary ambitions before I did.

I could see how ridiculous it was even while I could hear the argument. Drink for the story. Give yourself something interesting to write down.

Fuck that.

These notes follow what happens to me. I don't make things happen for the notes.

If something happens, I write it down. I don't manufacture it because it might make a better story.

I've already supplied alcohol with enough excuses.

I couldn't sleep.

I don't mean I was lying there mildly pissed off, staring at the ceiling wondering if I'd get a few hours before morning. I mean properly awake. Brain going mental. Turning things over and over and over.

Alcohol. My wife. My boy. Work. Money. Me.

Mostly me.

And somewhere during that night, something changed.

I wish I could explain exactly what it was. That's partly why I started writing things down.

There wasn't some dramatic moment where I poured a bottle down the sink. No doctor gave me terrible news. I hadn't been arrested. I hadn't woken up in a police cell or crashed the car or lost my business.

Nothing like that happened.

Something just clicked.

And I suddenly knew something that, if I'm being completely truthful, I'd probably known for quite a long time.

I was addicted to alcohol.

Even writing that sentence now feels strange.

At the time I used a different word. I picked up my phone and wrote to my wife:

"I am an alcoholic."

I don't particularly like that word now.

Nobody says heroinholic. Cocaineholic. Methoholic.

Why does the substance I became addicted to get to become the name of what I am?

But that night I needed the word.

I think I needed something strong enough to finally cut through my own bullshit.

Because I'd become exceptionally good at bullshit.

Not necessarily bullshitting everyone else. Although there had certainly been plenty of that.

The person I'd become really good at bullshitting was myself.

I could tell myself I was stressed.

I'd been working too hard.

Money was worrying me.

I'd had a difficult day.

I'd had a good day.

I deserved a drink.

I'd been good recently.

I'd stop tomorrow.

I'd cut down.

I'd proved I could stop before, therefore clearly I didn't have a problem.

Someone else was drinking, therefore I might as well.

I could manufacture a perfectly reasonable explanation for doing the one thing some other part of my brain was desperately asking me not to do.

And the really fucked-up thing?

Both voices were me.

That's what fascinates me now.

I'm an artist. I'm not a doctor, neuroscientist, psychologist or addiction expert.

I'm simply the person this happened to, like many other people whose brains have learned their own versions of the same arguments.

And I've become slightly obsessed with understanding what it was doing.

I don't know how this story ends.

That's important.

I'm not writing this down five years sober, looking backwards and arranging everything into a neat story where every warning sign was obvious and every lesson makes perfect sense.

I'm writing it down while it's happening.

I might read some of this in a year's time and discover that I understood addiction completely wrongly.

I hope I do.

I might discover that some of the things I'm absolutely convinced about today are complete pish.

They stay in the notes.

Because I don't want to write the clever version afterwards.

I want to know what happens when somebody who analyses absolutely everything finally accepts that he's become addicted to alcohol and turns that obsessive curiosity onto himself.

I want to understand the little demon.

Where it came from.

Why I listened to it.

Why it was sometimes so convincing.

Why I hid what I was doing.

Why I thought I was smarter than it.

And what happens now that I've finally stopped pretending it isn't there.

This isn't me explaining how I beat alcohol.

I haven't.

I've only just started.

I am not an addiction expert. I am an artist who became addicted to alcohol and then, apparently, became completely fascinated by what the fuck had been going on inside my own head.

I analyse everything.

After something changed in my head, I started writing things down. Thoughts. Questions. Memories. Things the little demon was saying to me. Things I suddenly realised I had been doing for years. Sometimes something would occur to me while I was making coffee and I would write that down too.

It helped. That is really the only reason I kept doing it.

Somewhere along the way the little demon acquired a name. Gollum. G for short, mainly because I could not be arsed typing Gollum every time. Then, because apparently this was not ridiculous enough already, I started calling myself Sméagol. S.

G and S are both me. I am not hearing voices. There are not two separate personalities living in my head. It is simply a shorthand that makes sense to me for describing an argument I have had with myself far too many times. G is the bit constructing the argument for alcohol. S is simply the person this happened to, like many other people. Sometimes he bought the argument. Increasingly he tells G to fuck off.

I am writing this as it happens. That means I will probably contradict myself. I will remember things later that change how I understand something I wrote earlier. I might become absolutely convinced of something today and decide in six months that it was complete pish.

I do not want to go back and make myself cleverer afterwards.

So the pish stays too.